A Rare Look at the 55-Year-Old Sketches That Inspired Dr. Seuss' New Book

Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, wrote and illustrated 44 children's books during his lifetime. The last, Oh the Places You'll Go! was published in 1990, and he died the following year. But 24 years later, an unpublished manuscript has been discovered — in a box, though not with a fox — and will be released July 28.

After his death in 1991, Audrey Geisel, his widow, cleaned out his office at their La Jolla, California, house. Most of his illustrations and early drafts were donated, but she kept one box of apparent doodles and half-finished sketches, The New York Times reports.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

The box sat in storage until October 2013, when she and an assistant decided to get the contents appraised. They found unexpected gems inside: a set of vividly illustrated alphabet flashcards and a manila folder titled "Notable Failures," packed with sketches that never made it into his stories. But there was also one more fleshed-out project marked "The Pet Shop." In it, Geisel had cut-and-pasted squares of typed text — in his signature tongue-twisting rhymes — onto 16 black-and-white illustrated pages.

Most Popular

"We didn't know that we had such a treasure," the assistant, Claudia Prescott, toldThe New York Times. (Prescott worked for The Cat in the Hat author for almost 20 years and now manages Dr. Seuss Enterprises with his 93-year-old widow.)

Those pages have been meticulously restored and compiled into a new book, called What Pet Should I Get?And like many Seuss tales, it tells the story of a brother and sister. But this time they're tasked with choosing a pet in the shop and face a daunting number of choices.

Geisel, an infamous perfectionist, had left the team reconstructing his story their own set of intimidating options: Typically, his process was to type words for a page and tape them to the drawings, which he usually shaded with colored pencil. Any revisions would be taped on top of the old versions. But some of the papers came loose over time, leaving the final text unclear — some sections had as many as five possible rhyme schemes, according to The New York Times.

Either way, he never submitted the manuscript, which archivists estimate was written in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The siblings are nearly identical to those in One Fish, Two Fish, which was published in 1960. One theory is that Geisel, who once described his writing as "logical insanity," used it as a starting point for the beloved classic that has taught generations to read.

"He often worked on something and tucked it away to return to later," Audrey Geisel told The New York Times in a statement. "I imagine he was doing just that, and then discovered new stories to tell that took his attention away from it."